Weekend funeral for closing of The Alley a sign of the times

Phil Velasquez / Chicago Tribune

Mark Thomas (RIGHT) is shuttering the The Alley in Lakeview after 39 years in business. The department store that catered to punkers, goths and rockers just isn't seeing the foot traffic it once did. A funeral will be held at the store on Saturdeay night.

Mark Thomas (RIGHT) is shuttering the The Alley in Lakeview after 39 years in business. The department store that catered to punkers, goths and rockers just isn't seeing the foot traffic it once did. A funeral will be held at the store on Saturdeay night.

The Alley, the Lakeview department store catering to bikers, punks, Goths and rockers, will hold a funeral Saturday as it prepares to close its doors for good, but in some ways it feels like another nail in the coffin for brick-and-mortar retail stores.

The 39-year-old business at 3228 N. Clark St. no longer sees the steady stream of customers coming in and out of its front doors that it once did, the owner said. The Alley isn't alone. Recent Black Friday weekend sales paint a picture: Online purchases outpaced in-store purchases, according to the National Retail Federation's Thanksgiving Weekend Survey.

“The foot traffic to Lakeview has dropped over the last decade,” The Alley owner Mark Thomas told RedEye. “There has been a shift in the way people are spending their money, and the Internet is where a lot of business is going.”

Online shopping and a shift in consumer spending are hurting big and small businesses, according to Mary Ann McGrath, professor of marketing at Quinlin School of Business at Loyola University Chicago.

“There is a new consumer process. If they go to the store, they are there to browse and use the expertise of the people there, then they go home, start reading reviews of different products and end up buying online,” McGrath said. “It’s the new reality of the marketplace—we’ve moved in the direction where everything is a competition for price.”

Storefront operations like The Alley are becoming increasingly more expensive to maintain and can be hurt by their niche offerings, said Tim Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

“The retailers that are doing better are a bit more insulated from the online competition,” Calkins said. “They are usually selling day-to-day items, so the incentive to go online to shop is a little less.”

But in the world today, Web retail giant Amazon.com is making life tough for all retailers, Calkins added.

"Amazon has generated a huge amount of revenue growth, and that growth is coming from the lost revenue of other retailers, small and big," Calkins said.

Thomas said the final straw for The Alley was the start of construction of a new building next door that will eventually house a Target.

“We could have made it through, but when concrete trucks were parked in front of our storefront, people didn’t see us. Our foot traffic dropped and our sales dropped, and we just couldn’t hang on,” Thomas said.

The Alley’s funeral is set for 9 p.m. this Saturday. Thomas said the event will be a chance for longtime customers to dress up, mingle as a community and say goodbye. The funeral will also include a memorial T-shirt giveaway to the first 100 people to arrive, a casket, a hearse and possibly a band.

Thomas hopes to open The Alley as a different business and at a different location. The plan is for it to be a combo coffeehouse and performance space in the coming months.